Translating and Reimagining - Recovering Pizarnik in her late Prose Works

Bachelor Thesis , 2011 , 112 Pages , Grade: Pass

Literature - Latin America

This senior thesis thesis examines the authorial image of Argentine-Jewish poet, Alejandra Pizarnik (1936-1972). Long thought of as a modern poet with minimal connection to any one tradition, I re-imagine her as a poet of Judaism, language and childhood through close readings of works, many poemas en prosa, written late in her life and after her father’s death. This thesis has three chapters: (1) Images of the Artist; (2) New Readings of Pizarnik (Prose) Poems; and (3) Translating Pizarnik (Prose) Poems. In the first chapter I examine notions of Pizarnik created by critics and by the public, then move to re-imagining her as a poet in a new lens. In chapter 2, close-readings of prose poems substantiate those claims made in my re-imagining. Finally, chapter 3 provides annotated translations of five poems, four previously untranslated—Los muertos y la lluvia (The Dead and the Rain), Dificultades barrocas (Baroque Difficulties), Desconfianza (Distrust), Devoción (Devotion), and the only poem in verse, Poema para el padre (Poem for my Father). My interpretation of Pizarnik is influenced by concepts including, J. Lacan’s ‘desire,’ Bachelard’s 'poetics of internal space,’ Turner’s 'liminality,’ and Borges’ 'infidelity in translation,’ amongst others. Ultimately, I hope this reading of the complicated poet succeeds in recovering essential aspects of her cuerpo poetico (poetic body of work).

Contents

List of Images

Foreword

A Short Biographical Sketch

List of Major Published Works

I Images of the Artist: Alejandra Pizarnik
Introduction
Existing Popular and Critical Images of Alejandra Pizarnik
Reimagining Alejandra Pizarnik

II New Readings of Pizarnik (Prose) Poems
The Jewish Question
Language
Childhood

III Translating Pizarnik (Prose) Poems
Introduction
Los muertos y la lluvia / The Dead and the Rain
Dificultades barrocas / Baroque Difficulties
Desconfianza / Distrust
Devoción / Devotion
Poema para el padre / Poem for my Father

IV Conclusion

V Bibliography

List of Images

1.a A. P.^[1] sitting with a man and an umbrella

1.b A. P. sitting with an umbrella

2 A. P. with cigarette and a photo of a doll’s face

3 An example of digital folk art in honor of A. P

Foreword

I began this project wanting strongly to write a thesis on theories of translation practice. But when I approached my advisor at the time he recommended another idea. Instead of translating ‘whoever’ and focusing my efforts on a disembodied theory, what if I focused on a poet in particular and made translations of their work. Then I was recommended Alejandra Pizarnik who encountered themes I might be interested in and had made translations herself and was Argentine—a culture and people I had come to love. That was in the spring of 2010. That summer I left to do an internship in Washington DC. Among excursions to the National Mall, I also spent many hours in the Library of Congress, where I had a researcher card and access to the great room. If you had seen my personal shelf, you would have seen it covered with Pizarnik titles— Árbol de Diana, Pizarnik as Psychoanalyst, Prosa completa, Diarios. It was a great time for me. I was feeling independent and like an actual researcher for the first time. I sent my advisor an email from New Jersey, just after returning from a trip to Israel and stopping off at a friends house for a Friday night: “I have also been carrying with me a copy of the Condesa sangriente, which is conceptually fascinating and I think would be considered a series of prose poems (do you agree?)” I asked in the email, waiting for an answer to the question of ‘prose poetry,’ an answer I would only—kind of—receive much later.

That summer I discovered Pizarnik’s work La condesa sangriente and also found out Pizarnik was Jewish; this work and the knowledge of her Judaism would come to be one of the central aspects in my thinking about the poet throughout the remainder of my work on her texts. This was a natural connection for me to make with Pizarnik since I grew up in a Jewish, Spanish-speaking household. Pizarnik’s work talks a lot about connections and how we make them and communicate with each other, and on the other hand, how we sometimes fail to make them and ultimately fail to commune. Sometimes it takes an act of translation to make one person’s voice intelligible to another. This is what has been the focus of my work, translating and reimagining Pizarnik so as to make her intelligible to the world in which I bring her across and into.

In this thesis the reader will find the fruit of a year of research, writing and translating. In the first chapter we see the existing critical and popular visions of Pizarnik outlined, as well as the ways in which I move to envision or reimagine her. In the second chapter I go through close reading of primarily prose poems that encounter the themes of Judaism, language, and childhood in a meaningful way. Finally, in the third chapter are translations I wrote of five works by the author, four never before translated.

I am both satisfied and unsatisfied with this thesis that grew from my research period. More translation theory, more translations, more sources for Jewish, Latin American writers of comparison—these are the things I would have added more of—if it weren’t for limited time and an idealist’s lack of commonsense.

A Short Biographical Sketch

Alejandra Pizarnik was born in Buenos Aires on April 29, 1936. Rosa or Rezja Bromiker de Pizarnik and Elías Pizarnik, the Mother and Father of Alejandra, had crossed the Atlantic in a boat arriving in Buenos Aires, Argentina two years prior in 1934. Fascism had been on the rise in Europe. Uprisings of Stalinism and Nazism had made life particularly difficult for Europe’s Jewry. Broadly, many European countries were still struggling, navigating the repercussions of the First World War. The Pizarnik’s were Jewish and under the mounting pressure chose to leave and immigrate to Argentina.

Elías’ brother was in Paris at the time where he had found work. Because of this Rosa and Elías were able to stop over in Paris for some months before leaving for Buenos Aires. It was in this moment that Elías began his love of French culture, which Alejandra later inherited.

Like the story of many immigrants, their family name was most likely

changed from Pozharnik to Pizarnik when they came in through the port of Buenos Aires. The Russian couple was already pregnant with Myriam, Alejandra’s older sister. Now they had to overcome the challenge of forging a life in a Spanish-speaking land when the couple spoke only Russian and Yiddish.

Fortunately, Elías had his wits about him and quickly became a “cuentenik”^[2] and was able to secure his family a home in the province of Buenos Aires, Avellaneda. “Flora” Pizarnik was born April 29, 1936 into a middle-class, Jewish family in Avellaneda. Of course, “Flora” would later become Alejandra Pizarnik, our poet. Elías made adequate money to send both his daughters to the Zalman Reizien Schule, (“Schule” is Yiddish for synagogue) where they were taught to read and write in Yiddish and instructed in the history of the Jewish people and in their religion. This was additional to their attendance at School Number 7, the public school of Avellaneda. During those times her father liked to listen to music and play the violin; he passed on his interest in Edith Piaf and others to Alejandra.

During her childhood, Alejandra suffered from asthma, acne, and a slight stutter. She also struggled to keep her weight down, a difference from her sister who was naturally thin. Trying to adjust her weight, Alejandra began consuming amphetamines, which later became an addiction and led to her familiarity with pills. Her parents were lenient and as an adolescent she was free to dress how she liked and her father was very amiable towards her friends.

In 1954, she enrolled in the University of Buenos Aires. There she studied philosophy, journalism and literature and got involved with the crowd of Peronist-supporting progressives and artists. They invited her to “noches de vino y rosas” (“nights of wine and roses”) and among them she began to find her “literary family” and her “madre literaria,” Olga Orozco.

From 1960 to 1964 Alejandra lived and studied in Paris. At the Sorbonne she matriculated in history of religion and contemporary French literature. Also, during this time she contributed articles to journals, Sur, Zona Franca, La Nación, and other publications. It was a very active and exciting time for the artist. Her only stable job was one she got thanks to friend Octavio Paz, the Mexican Ambassador to France at the time; Pizarnik wrote for the magazine Cuadernos para la Libertad de la Cultura. UNESCO^[3] sponsored the journal and another of Pizarnik’s close friends, Julio Cortázar, worked for the international organization as well. However, Pizarnik did not enjoy writing for Cuadernos, calling it too bureaucratic for her tastes.

Pizarnik returned to Buenos Aires in 1964. Following her return she published three of her many volumes, Los trabajos y las noches, Extracción de la piedra de locura, and El infierno musical, as well as the prose work La condesa sangrienta. In 1966 Pizarnik received the Primer Premio Municipal de Poesía, signifying the institutional recognition of her value as a writer.

January 18, 1967 Elías Pizarnik died of a heart attack. This event brought with it a new era for Pizarnik.^[4] More time under the spell of depression, terror. She turned thirty the following April. Nevertheless, she began to undertake more work and felt renewed interest in her own Judaism and Jewish writers and texts.

In 1969 she was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship, and in 1971 a Fulbright scholarship. She traveled to New York City briefly and returned to Paris. However, in Paris she returned to a place where she was once happy, only to find a city where she no longer felt at home. It was no longer the literary haven she had once loved.

Finally, on September 25, 1972, at the age of thirty six, on a weekend break from the hospital in Buenos Aires where she was a warden, Pizarnik took fifty pills of Seconal and died, fulfilling her long-standing desire to cease to exist.

Major Published Works

- La tierra más ajena (Buenos Aires: Botella al mar, 1955)
- La última inocencia (Poesía Buenos Aires, 1956. Reeditado en 1976 por Ed. botella al Mar, junto con Las aventuras perdidas)
- Las aventuras perdidas (1958)
- Otros poemas (1959)
- Árbol de Diana (Buenos Aires, Sur, 1962)
- Los trabajos y las noches (Buenos Aires, Sudamericana, 1965)
- Extracción de la piedra de locura (Buenos Aires, Sudamericana, 1968)
- Nombres y figuras (Barcelona, Colección La Esquina, 1969)
- La condesa sangrienta (Buenos Aires: Lopez Crespo Editorial, 1971) (Prosa)
- El infierno musical (Buenos Aires, Siglo XXI Argentina, 1971)
- Los pequeños cantos (Caracas: Árbol de Fuego, 1971)
- El deseo de la palabra (antología) (1975)
- Zona prohibida (Veracruz, México, Ediciones Papel de Envolver, Colección Luna Hiena, 1982)
- Textos de sombra y últimos poemas (1982)
- Los poseídos entre lilas (Teatro)
- Prosa completa. Editorial Lumen, (2002)
- Diarios. Editorial Lumen (2003)

Part I

Images of the Artist

i. Introduction

Alejandra Pizarnik is well known in literary circles in South America, France and Spain, with an even broader following in Argentina, yet remains obscure here in the U.S for the non-specialist. For readers new to Pizarnik, it is important to specify some of the ways she has been imagined, or represented by herself and others, up to this point. While, of course, I will not attempt a comprehensive summary of the innumerable dissertations, articles and websites devoted to Pizarnik, this chapter will offer a brief, concise summary of the images of Pizarnik I have come across during my research period.

The images I came across took primarily three forms: (1) the poeta maldita, a category that locates Pizarnik within a broad artistic movement (French Symbolism and its followers) and casts light on her literary heritage; (2) the suicide poet, fracturing into two aspects, one emphasized by critics and the other by the public and, finally; (3) the transgressive, lesbian poet.

These potentially sensationalized^[5] aspects of Pizarnik as an artist are often emphasized at the expense of more social-cultural and historical aspects of her work and personality, such as her upbringing and milieu (Garcia-Moreno 68). The outsider aspects—Pizarnik the poeta maldita, Pizarnik the suicide poet, Pizarnik the surrealist, Pizarnik the depressive narcissist—so emphasized, are the image of Pizarnik most readers have in mind: The dark, cigarette smoking, sexually ambiguous, adolescent poet with a love of French culture.

The re-imagining section of this chapter discusses some of Pizarnik’s other aspects through my re-thinking of her authorial image: (1) as a poet of Judaism; (2) a poet of language; and (3) a poet of childhood. Here, I recast her as a relatable human being with conflicted relationships to her family’s religion and history and to her own childhood and language(s). As the foundation for these claims I draw on the recently released, and so less discussed, posthumously published, Diarios (2003) and Prosa Completa (2002).

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I. Existing Popular and Critical Images of the Artist

En la noche a tu lado

las palabras son claves, son llaves.

El deseo de morir es rey.

ALEJANDRA PIZARNIK

While we may never know another completely, we can ask, as a point of departure, who is Alejandra Pizarnik? In the title to this chapter I chose to refer to Alejandra Pizarnik as an artist—“image of the artist.” But hadn’t we already established that Pizarnik, clearly, was a writer? The answer, in short, is yes and no. Yes, her primary medium was language, evidenced by her many poems, essays, and translations. Yet, she was an artist in the twentieth-century conception of the modern artist, which I see as having an extremely reflexive and creative role in society (or one might argue outside of it)^[6]. This is evident in Pizarnik’s conscious creation and projection of an artistic self-image, and, by the fact that because of this image she became famous for her personality as much as for the quality of her work. Here, we will look into the images^[7] of Pizarnik that have been canonized, in a sense, by her critics and readers. To begin, in the images below we can note, visually, her provocative self-fashioning^[8]:

illustration not visible in this excerpt

1.a 1.bPhotos taken from Christina Pi ña’s book, Alejandra Pizarnik.

1.b is, curiously, the way 1.a is consistently found cropped on the Internet.

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In the images we see that there was a performative aspect to her body of work. She was a kind of performance artist who resists categorization as exclusively writer or poet. We tend to imagine writers behind a typewriter (or these days, computer). Perhaps we are exposed to them only in their headshot on the back cover of their book or in a magazine. However, this is not the case for Pizarnik. In fact, the images above are only a few of the many photographic images published of Pizarnik. For example, Alejandra Pizar nik Iconografía is a book of photographs from Pizarnik’s life. The publication of this book in 2008 testifies to her iconic status in Argentina, as well as to just how alluring images of Pizarnik continue to be for certain audiences.

Particularly, in the photos above it is interesting to note her subdued playfulness and avant-garde sensibilities. These photos must have been shocking when they came out in 1960s Argentina with their bizarre and enigmatic qualities^[9]. In (1.a) notice the innocence and childlike playfulness of Pizarnik and her sideways glance. Notice that she sits without pants, as if she were a child and such things were normal. Notice the way she is positioned, almost sitting on the knee of the male figure besides her. Notice the leading lines: the umbrella pointing to her head and the handle down towards her genitals. Now, notice the menacing gaze of the male figure towards “the girl” beside him. Notice the way his mouth and ears are covered. Also notice the strange cornucopia-like bag dangling between his legs that suggests a phallus and is positioned towards Pizarnik, “the little girl.” Notice her bright, white colors and his dark tones. After looking at the image with this level of scrutiny it is transformed, becoming slightly disturbing instead of only silly or just playful.

In addition, a common trait shared by all of the photos above is that they appear to have been staged. Notice the use of props, such as the surrealistic umbrella and the childlike dolls face mirroring Pizarnik’s own. These props embellish the images moving them into the realm of the absurd. In image (2) Pizarnik’s slightly opened mouth with dangling cigarette is strangely erotic, as well as her nude legs in (1.a) and (1.b.), though both share a kind of childlike, ambiguous sexuality, an innocence, framed by the short hair, round face and large open eyes. Another important aspect is that each image includes a book or books, framing Pizarnik as a reader, writer and intellectual.

Pizarnik’s success at projecting an image of an expressive and intriguing artist exploring boundaries, forms and gender norms has contributed to her popularity in Argentina. Her ability to promote this image and network with fellow artists is clearly evident from her diaries, letters to friends, and biography. Whereas this notion may go against the way we generally perceive of her as reclusive, one can be confident that her ties to other artists has contributed to her lasting fame and publication. Of course, that is not to diminish the quality of her work, without which her success would have been impossible. Nevertheless, realizing that success is also dependent on one’s own self-fashioning, Pizarnik emulated her predecessors. For example, she read other writer’s diaries and kept her own, aware that it could eventually enter public domain and be an important contribution to her authorial image. “¿Este diario, lo escribo para mí? ¿Ahora, estoy escribiendo para mí?” (“This diary, I write it for myself? Now, I am writing for me?”) (Pizarnik 395). Here, Pizarnik questions the intimacy of her diary, to which we can reply, now, implicitly as readers, that we are also here.

Moving away from her performative aspect and towards her writing, let’s now look at the next broad question: what kind of a poet was Pizarnik according to the critics? Scholars and critics often align her poetic and creative works (as opposed to her expository or journalistic work) with a dark and transgressive strain of experimental avant-gardism, one that Latin American artists of her time re-casted from the French, anti-tradition of the poetas malditos. One of these poetas malditos was Isidore Ducasse, Comte de Lautréamont (1846-1870). Born in Uruguay to French parents, he later returned to France where he wrote his seminal work, Les Chants de Maldoror, often described as the first surrealist book. Christina Piña, Pizarnik’s biographer, claims that Lautréamont was “uno de las poetas mas importantes para la configuración de la estética de Alejandra” (“one of the most important poets in the configuration of Alejandra’s aesthetic”) (Piña 92). Piña also ascertains that in the literary aesthetic of Nerval, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Lautréamont, and Artaud, poetry was a transcendent and absolute act that implicated, truly, an ethic. An ethic that critics say Pizarnik configured her life around. According to Piña, it was the myth and ethics of the Poeta Maldito that lured Pizarnik to commit suicide.

This leads to my next point, that one of Pizarnik’s most emphasized and remembered images is that of the suicide poet. For Pia, and literary critics, there is another layer to Pizarnik’s death, as I stated above, in which her suicide is seen as the culmination of her poetic project:

Desarrollaré en detalle esta relación entre la Alejandra-poeta y la Alejandra-persona biográfica más adelante; por ahora, basta señalar que su estética literaria—que la inscribe en la tradición de poetas como Nerval, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Lautreamont, Artaud y otros concibieron a la poesía como un acto transcendente y absoluto que implicaba una verdadera ética —llevó a Alejandra a configurar su vida según el conjunto de rasgos tradicionalmente atribuidos al mito del poeta maldito, mito éste que culmina con la muerte real o metafórica, voluntaria o accidental, como gesto extremo ante la imposibilidad de conjugar la exigencia de absoluto que se le atribuye a la tarea poética con las limitaciones de la experiencia vital, de unir vida y poesía “en un solo instante de incandescencia,” como lo dijo admirablemente Octavio Paz.

Quien, como Alejandra, escribió que aspiraba a hacer “el cuerpo de poema con mi cuerpo,” se proponía hacer de su vida la materialización de su poética, convertirse en el personaje de su absoluto verbal. (Piña 16-17)

Here, in her prologue to Pizarnik’s biography, Piña suggests that Pizarnik committed suicide as an act of faithfulness to the ethics and aesthetics of the poetas malditos. What interests me is not so much to think over whether this is true or false, seeing that different readers will have a variety of readings of Pizarnik’s textual continuum, which links her work and life. Rather, I bring this to the table in order to demonstrate, again, how alluring and overpowering these controversial or sensational aspects of Pizarnik’s life and work have been to critics and common readers alike, fundamentally altering how the poet has been imagined and how later readers receive(d) her. Piña’s reading of Pizarnik’s suicide may seem absurd or extreme to some; however it is the narrative of a literary critic delving to extract meaning from a tragic event that remains incomprehensible and which curtailed Pizarnik’s literary output. It is tempting to try and imagine what kind of work Pizarnik would have gone on to write had she not committed suicide.

The casual reader of Pizarnik is likely more aware of the details of her death than of her poetics. I was also intrigued by the details of her death and by the sensationalized images of her “gothic” and dark side that may of brought her to her mysterious end. Why? When we abstract the narrative, we see it is not unlike the story and death of Marilyn Monroe: The female artist suffers from drug use, an excess of success, depressive tendencies and an obsession with her image. She wishes to remain forever young. Then she dies from a drug overdose and audiences are left wondering if it was accidental or purposeful. Either way, the image of the artist is then set unalterably as the face and body of the young women at or before the time of death. The question is why is the public so obsessed with this kind of narrative? Why are we so attracted to it? to images of it? I would answer that this kind of narrative attracts and repels us with its drama and eroticism. Potently, the imagination is captured by the image of youthful beauty, soiled with blood. The women’s celebrity promises that their death will be remembered, fulfilling a kind of deep-seated longing for eternity and eternal beauty, which the photos and images of these women promise to keep on providing to audiences. This is why if one searches for images of Alejandra Pizarnik on the Internet, one finds much fan art of this sort:

illustration not visible in this excerpt

3Ella se desnuda en el para í so// de su memoria// Ella desconoce el Feroz destino// de sus visiones// Ella tiene miedo de no saber nombrar// lo que no existe.

In the foreground of the image is a women’s profile, her face streaming with blood tears, and, in the background, a kind of empty clearing with a backlit tree. Words from Pizarnik’s poem, Árbol de Diana, and blood splatter over the scene. Aesthetically, the image quality bears resemblance to computer graphics because it is digital. This fan or folk art, along with the many testimonial conversations I’ve had with Argentines on the subject, reveals that Pizarnik is popular with gothic fans in Argentina, appealing to their sensitivities. In a way, the image says we are haunted and intrigued by what we cannot understand: madness leading to suicide, or too much talent, too much expression leads to calamity. Returning to our earlier discussion, for Monroe and Pizarnik their talent led to death. In other words, they burned. Is this some kind of warning in popular culture, as in do not become an eccentric, do not be beautiful, sensitive and willing? We want to watch the spectacle but we, as in the public, are unwilling to go there ourselves. Ultimately, giving too much of yourself to the public will become forced stasis, forming an image which becomes like a cell and the person beneath, a bipolar inmate. They are surrounded by the images of themselves and their identity ceases to belong to them, but instead belongs to the public, hence they are trapped in their image as it is reflected back to them in the public eye. Old age would have been a kind of death for these figures anyway—of the myth of their ideal and darkly alluring beauty. Many times in her diaries Pizarnik is worried about losing her “cara de niña.” Ultimately, the emotional, female artist looses all grounding and kills herself. The moral: do not live too fully, or freely, or try to ascend the quotidian into other ecstatic realms because it is tragedy one finds in extremes.

After briefly discussing the images of Pizarnik as a poeta maldita and a suicide poet I now move to summarize the image I have come across of her as a homosexual poet of radical morality, or, as a “lesbian.” I begin by pointing to Pizarnik’s inclusion in the anthology, Who’s Who in Contemporary Gay and Lesbian History: from WWII to the present (Aldrich, Robert, and Garry Wotherspoon). Her presence in this anthology situates her within the canonized group of homosexual intellectuals of the twentieth century. According to the passage on Pizarnik, there have been a number of queer readings of her work, such as Entiendes? Queer Readings, Hispanic Writings. More specifically, of her motifs and signs, and, especially, of her work, La condesa sangrienta, which critics ascertain is “her most graphic representation of lesbianism.” Some have even called it a lesbian vampire story. In The Look that Kills: The “Unacceptable Beauty” of Alejandra Pizarnik’s La condesa sangrienta, Suzanne Silverman reads Pizarnik’s obsession with “silence” as indicative of the “closeted” notion (utilized by Silverman) of Pizarnik’s sexuality, and, ultimately lesbianism. She also says that the establishment of literary critics worka, for the most part, to keep Pizarnik’s lesbian status “closeted” because in Argentina lesbians have been systematically oppressed. Returning to the Who’s who anthology, they also call readings of Pizarnik as a poeta maldita or a girl refusing to grow up “domesticated and “less-threatening rubrics” than readings of her as a lesbian poet. Here, the idea is that she is more radical, more subversive, more transgressive and “threatening” when read as a lesbian poet.

If we do not see Pizarnik talking directly about her lesbianism in her diary entries, we can read, at least, her radical sexual morality and behaviors. Pizarnik writes, “Cometer el acto es anular el motivo de la espera. De allí que no pueda establecer una relación erótica continua con nadie. Solo con noches aisladas, experimentos previos” (Pizarnik 317). (“To commit the act is to annul the motivation of the wait. From there it isn’t possible to establish a continuous erotic relationship with nobody. Only with isolated nights, prior experiments.”) That was from 1963. And here in 1965 there is a more developed sense and knowledge of her sexual self; while not appearing specifically homosexual, it does resonate with the sexual “free love” revolution of the ‘60s mixed with melodrama and the thoughts of a person familiar with the psychology of desire:

¿Por qué necesito humillarme?

¿Por qué necesito llamar a quien no quiere venir y por qué me entristece recibir a quien llega con deseos de verme? Por que el amor de alguien a mí infunde en mí odio por ese alguien y por qué la indiferencia de cualquiera me fascina? Aun si todo va más o menos serenamente necesito, cada dos o tres meses, una noche de hundimiento […] Una noche sexual es agonía, es muerte y es la única felicidad. Por ciertos gestos, ciertas palabras, y pierdo conciencia, y estoy ebria cuando me desnudan, algo lejano y presente. Se repite lo que no se vio nunca. Siempre hago el amor por primera vez. Mi asombro, mi perdición, mi asfixia, mi liberación. Soy una cobarde. Lo sexual, para mí, es el único camino de iniciación. Y a veces lo abandono por miedo. Así como para otros el ascetismo, para mí lo sexual (Pizarnik 392-393). 12 Marzo 1965. (Translation is my own).

[Why must I humiliate myself?

Why must I call to who doesn’t want to come and why am I saddened to receive those who arrive with desires to see me? Why is it that the love of someone fills me with hate for this someone and why the indifference of anybody who fascinates me? Still if all goes more or less serenely I need, every two or three months, a night of collapse […] A sexual night is agony, is death and is the only happiness.

But certain gestures, certain words, and I lose consciousness, and I am drunk when they undress me, kind of distant and present. They repeat that they saw nothing. Always, I make love for the first time. My surprise, my undoing, my asphyxia, my liberation. I am a coward. The sexual, for me, is the only path of initiation. And at times I abandon it for fear. The way asceticism is for others, the sexual is for me.] March 12, 1965

In the above passage from 1965, Pizarnik speaks about her sexuality and questions of sexual morality. Typical for Pizarnik, she is ambiguous and does not include concrete details. Instead, she self-reflexively questions why she needs to humiliate herself by seeking unrequited lovers. She also talks about sex as initiation and asserts that she always makes love for the first time, a very provocative and unconventional idea in that ignores social mores, e.g. of “virginity” and “purity.” All of these notions are fairly radical, in the sense that they do not fit in with common or conventional notions and modes of sexuality. It seems to me that Pizarnik had her own ways of thinking and perhaps feeling confused about sexuality, and that those cannot be so readily ascribed to any single category, such as lesbian. Either way, we

can be sure she never married or had children, but rather she seemed to stay always an adolescent, always liminal^[10] and experimental.

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II. Re-Imagining Alejandra Pizarnik

This re-imagining section will offer brief highlights of those aspects of Pizarnik that first called me to reimagine her in modes distinct from the ones expounded on in the preceding chapter. Here, I move to discuss what I have labeled her other aspects; other in the sense that, with the exception of ‘language,’ critics and readers have not often focused on them. Given readings of Pizarnik as “other”—marginal in most ways—these are what some might deem the more normative aspects of an otherwise wholly eccentric figure: her attention to: (1) her Judaism; (2) language(s); and (3) childhood. I admit that ‘childhood,’ like ‘language,’ has also been discussed (Mackintosh talks about her perpetual adolescence) though not in the way I will here, less theoretically and more biographically (in the sense that I focus on her childhood instead of ‘childhood’ as an abstract notion or symbol). Why is it that critics and readers tend to stay away from these aspects? As I have been discussing, these are her less sensational qualities. They may not carry the mysterious allure of her darker, more transgressive and, ultimately, romanticizable aspects; and for some readers, these may seem unappealing or, simply, a bore.

Conversely, what I argue is that it may be that these aspects, which come from her life and are so fundamental to the substantive core of her work, have been taken for granted, overlooked as obvious, even obscured by the artist herself, the way we often live truly knowing ourselves only in hindsight. Whichever it may be, the shunning of these aspects in no way negates their importance, especially when it comes to understanding the artist, the person, and ultimately, her work.

The Jewish Question

I’ve made a substantial claim, asserting that Pizarnik is a poet of Judaism. Many critics would probably object that I am misrepresenting Pizarnik and her work, and I concede that Pizarnik never says she is a poet of Judaism in so many words. Nevertheless I have found sufficient references to Judaism, (practices, traditions) that this becomes a useful lens for reading her work.

Being Jewish was a leitmotif in Pizarnik’s thought. The motif appears in the diaries soon after the death of her father, Elías, on January 18, 1967 (of a heart attack) (Piña 155). Before that dramatic event, and, if we focus on the kind of attention and argument developed by most critics, then it does seem possible to develop an overview of Pizarnik’s oeuvre while barely touching on “Jewish aspects.” Yet, it is also possible to read almost every element of Pizarnik’s work as interacting with those issues in a significant way. This interaction is often hard to miss. Take for example her diary entry nine months after her father’s death:

Soy Judía. De esto se trata. Hace mucho tiempo que se trata solamente de esto. No soy argentina. Soy Judía. Este descubrimiento me obliga a impedir movimientos esenciales de mi naturaleza: buscar verdugos (V. luego S., ahora). Mi padre y el sufrimiento de mi raza me avisan que los desafié, que, si hace falta, me vuelva yo Verdugo. No puedo prolongar la cadena de esclavitud, de suavísima sumisión. Y, no obstante, temo con un terror nuevo que esto sea una nueva trampa que me tiendo. Acaso quiero adjudicar a mi ser judío esta imposibilidad absoluta de entrar en la comunidad Argentina que integro nominalmente. (Pizarnik 434) 30 octubre 1967

[I am Jewish. For some time it has been all about this. I am not Argentine. I am Jewish. This discovery forces me to stop essential movements of my nature: seeking executioners. (V. then S., now). My father and my race’s suffering warn me to defy them, that, if it is necessary, I become the Executioner. I cannot prolong the chain of slavery, of soft submission. And, nevertheless, I fear with a new terror that this is a new trap I set myself. Perhaps, I want to ascribe to my Jewish being this absolute impossibility of entering the Argentinean community I integrate only nominally.] October 30, 1967

This diary passage raises many interesting questions. Why was it okay, in Pizarnik’s mind, to seek power figures, “executioners,” as an Argentinean, but not as a Jew? How does she arrive so suddenly and dramatically to her identification with Judaism? Where were these feeling prior? Why so much fear? Feelings of alienation? Did she suddenly gain a new and profound level of self-understanding that includes being Jewish? It seems so. Here, Pizarnik thinks over her attempts to attribute to her Jewish being or “neshama” (Jewish soul) her inability to locate herself as Argentinian. Seeing that the themes of exile, dislocation and liminality are central in much of her work (Garcia-Moreno) this attribution becomes very significant in terms of her overall poetics. Suddenly, Judaism becomes central to the way Pizarnik understands herself: her feelings of alienation, despair—but also a newfound sense of pride? She can no longer softly submit. At the same time, it seems she is saying that her feelings of alienation may be causing her to want to ascribe them to her Judaism, when it may be that she was, in fact, just eccentric because she was not part of the status quo; Pizarnik never married and wore ambiguous dress in a time when Argentina had very specific expectations and roles for women that included marriage and child rearing. Still, others would argue that the above passage from her diary is another form of self-fashioning. However, I sense a sincerity here that crosses the boundaries of Pizarnik’s performance as an artist and comes from deeper realms of the heart. She is, after all, talking about her father and her race’s suffering, as if to she suddenly pay homage to what came before her, something the poeta maldito artist in Pizarnik would be weary of doing, considering modern poets aspire to break from all tradition.

In a series of lessons and conversations I had with Rabbi Manis Friedman,^[11] I came to understand that an essential aspect of being Jewish is “difference”—being different. Thinking about this, in these terms, paints Pizarnik as a quintessentially Jewish poet. She was obsessed with her own difference.“Por mi sangre Judía soy exilada”. (397 Pizarnik) (“Because of my Jewish blood, I am exiled.”) This may seem like a superficial connection and assertion, however when we look closer at those feelings of alienation, as Pizarnik did after her Father’s death, we find that “her Jewish question” was actually central to her feelings of otherness and isolation:

Mi cuestión judía. No sé. Me siento judía, me siento judía desde que regresé a este país que execro. Acaso por que esta signado por todo lo que odio: la estupidez[…] No quiero morir en este país. Padre, padre querido, no quiero morir en este país que—ahora lo sé—odiabas o temías. Del horror que te causaba, de la extranjeridad que te producía, solamente yo puedo dar testimonio. Y saberte para siempre, por siempre en esta tierra azarosa y basta (sic), nunca podré consolarme y debo irme y morir fuera de este lugar al que no debiste venir, padre, ni yo debí regresar. (Pizarnik 430-431) 23 Noviembre 1967

[My Jewish question. I don’t know. I feel Jewish, I’ve felt Jewish since I returned to this country which I loathe. Perhaps because it stands for everything I hate: stupidity […] I don’t want to die in this country. Father, dear father, I don’t want to die in this country that—now I know—you hated or feared. Of the horror that it caused you, of the alienation that it produced in you, only I can give testimony, and to know that you are forever, always, in this random and vast land, I will never be able to console myself and I should leave and die far from this place where you shouldn’t have come, father, and I shouldn’t have returned.] November 23, 1967

Here Pizarnik expresses her belief that her father felt alienated in Argentina as Jew and immigrant. She then transfers that feeling, applying it to herself. She laments, wishing that she could die in another país (country), in other words, that she could find a patria (fatherland) in another country, where she could finally feel at home. Pizarnik expresses these same sentiments: alienation, being silenced by Argentinian society, through the speaker of her poem Poema para el padre. In that poem the father’s singing is silenced by an ambiguous outside force [see pg. 36, footnote 18]. We see that Pizarnik’s deeply rooted alienation and homelessness, central across her poetry, was caused, at least in part, by her existential, Jewish, angst. “Muchas lagrimas derramadas al pensar en Israel. Creo que ser judía es un hecho perfectamente grave.” (Pizarnik 469) (“Many tears spilt in thinking about Israel. I believe to be Jewish is a perfectly grave fact.”)

The view that Pizarnik’s prevalent sense of dislocation, homelessness and alienation was rooted not only in her ‘other’ status as poeta maldito, but also, fundamentally, in her Jewish and familial identity, is a stronger argument if we consider Pizarnik’s background. Her mother and father, Rosa or Rezja Bromiker de Pizarnik and Elías Pizarnik, were Jewish immigrants to Argentina. They arrived in Buenos Aires in 1934, amidst a climate of global unrest that would eventually become World War II. They spoke Yiddish and Russian, not yet Spanish, a fact (but Spanish they had to learn) immediately isolating them from the Spanish-speaking community. The Pizarnik’s sent their daughters—Myriam and our poet—to the local schule (synagogue) for classes in Jewish religion, history, and the Yiddish language. As a middle-class immigrant family with limited income, paying the extra money to send their daughters to schule (they also attended public school) demonstrates that Jewish culture and community was a priority for the Pizarniks. At the same time, this likely further distanced the family from the status quo in Buenos Aires.

Language

Here I will transition to discussing Pizarnik as a poet of language, a subject that has been well traversed (see pg. 48). As I already mentioned, the Pizarniks were polyglots (Russian, Yiddish, Spanish), Alejandra included. As a college student, she went on to study and learn French, as well. This knowledge of languages and the accompanying cultures located Pizarnik in-between and, I argue, was a major part of what lead to her acute awareness of subjectivity’s positioning in language. The ability to go in-between languages is akin to the ability to go in-between selves. “The poet rejoices in this incomparable privilege, that he can, at will, be both himself and another,” writes Baudelaire in Paris Spleen: Little Poems in Prose (Baudelaire 22), a work Alejandra Pizarnik will have read many times.^[12] What I am asserting is that Pizarnik’s ability as a poet to go in-between and write different selves had its roots in her nature as a polyglot and member of a polyglot family. At the same time, it can also be jarring, alienating, not to know which language is your home, to find yourself homeless, extraterritorial, liminal in a facet of human life—language—that is so very intimate with the core of our selves. The seat of identity is language: national identity is reified through the language of literature. Individual or subjective identity through the language one speaks, insofar as cultural knowledge is passed down through that language. In addition, the individual’s access to the world and to all social meaning is mediated by language.

We also see that Pizarnik’s family had an inside/outside division with language. As Piña has pointed out, the family spoke Yiddish in the home, but only so long as no outsiders were in the household. It is almost as if they were hiding their Yiddish, Jewish selves—for what? What does this have to say in relation with Pizarnik’s Poema para el padre, where the father’s song is silenced by an ambiguous outside force (see footnote 17, pg. 37 for more on this poem)? What does it say about the existence of oppression during Pizarnik’s and her father’s lifetimes? Born in 1936, Pizarnik was a child and an adolescent coming of age during World War II (1939 to 1945). General paranoia pervaded the air at the time, and in Argentina there was certainly discrimination against Jews and foreigners.^[13] Nevertheless, Jewish immigrants to Argentina struggled to create a thriving community in Buenos Aires.

Lastly, in relation to language, I will move to a more theoretical discussion of Pizarnik’s outspoken desire for words, which takes form quite literally in her work, such as in the title to her collection Deseo de la palabra (Desire of the Word or Desire for the Word) . In the most obvious way, one can be positive that one of Pizarnik’s obsessions was language because she chose to become a poet, translator and writer. In her many works, Pizarnik problematizes language in its most fundamental aspects. She did not have faith in it, given its inability to stabilize or produce unambiguous meaning. In other words, she was cognizant of language’s limitations. Language struggles to refer to what is becoming but not fully yet, what is perceived, intuited, even experienced but cannot be verbalized, in other words, cannot speak the ineffable. Humanity struggles to name things, which are not things, but time and process. Particularly in modern poetry, “the poet began to see the world with a dreadful particularity, as a great ineffable mass of inextricable processes” (Murdoch 59). As a sensitive poet, Alejandra Pizarnik was highly aware of alienation from the world’s processes (time) and the inability of language to describe experience. However, she fought her alienation, attempting to write herself, her body, in poems like Dificultades barrocas. Pizarnik, as a modern poet, was unwilling to inscribe herself into a tradition and instead, wrote her own moments and the “dreadful particularity” of her body. Ultimately, still, in “Dificultades barrocas,” among other works, her speaker’s primary expressions are the failure of expression (see pg. 53 for an analysis of Dificultades in these terms). Oftentimes, at the discordant center of a Pizarnik prose poem it seems an ineffable intuition pervades that cannot ever be expressed in words.

Childhood

Introducing, even briefly, the concept of time into our discussion of my re-imaging of Pizarnik is a transition into the third aspect of her work that I would like to emphasize: childhood. Alejandra Pizarnik was also a poet of childhood. Childhood in its most abstract sense as a thing one knows exists, and from which adults may feel exiled, but also childhood as the experience that we know through memory, as a specific time in life and in the development of the body and mind. There is a certain innocence to which one never can return like a paradise lost.

Pizarnik thematizes childhood in many of her poems and also in her diaries, where she obsesses with her own “cara de niña.” As it appears in her poetry, childhood and dolls are closely associated. From her life, we know also that Pizarnik’s apartment in Buenos Aires was filled with dolls and surrealistic collages. In an article from the magazine Panorama, dated January 5, 1971:

Entering [Pizarnik’s] apartment at 980 Montevideo Street is like walking into a lost world of wonder, into a magnetic cosmos of objects. Dolls that look like they are drowning in their dreams and sadness […] little animals of wood and metal escaped from some nightmare, surprisingly small furniture. (Beneyeto 25)

It is interesting to imagine the poet nearing 30 and living in a room filled with toys and the accompanying nostalgia for childhood. The objects in Pizarnik’s apartment suggest her fascination with the small, perfect dolls was part of her larger vision of the world. Perhaps in her imagination, Pizarnik was the little Alice still lost in a wonderland of her own vision.

Childhood appears in her poetry in ways other than imagery; Pizarnik also creates speakers that adopt childlike voices. In poems such as Desconfianza or Los muertos y la lluvia, a prose poem which Pizarnik chooses to frame with an epigraph that invokes the figure of the child Mamillius, from Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale, as opposed to an adult figure like the King or Queen. A part of Pizarnik’s poetics was to see through the eyes of a child. The childhood that, in truth, Pizarnik could not return to, a land she was quickly exiled from, could be revisited in the world of poetry, in the space of her internal world—where the spark of her poetic creation was kindled.

Pizarnik returned there frequently, featuring in her poetry the bosque (wood or forest) and the jardín (garden). Both the forest and the garden are and have been symbols associated with childhood in children’s literature 9but they are ambivalent images, of innocence, freedom and danger. Think of Alice in Wonderland, lost in the Queen’s rose garden. Think of Hansel and Gretel, alone in the forest (of, course they eventually kill the old witch in her oven, symbolically defeating the cynisism of old age). Clearly, in a child’s imagination the world can be a horrifying place full of nightmares, of “obscene gardens.” I would say in Pizarnik’s poetry there were more nightmares than sweet dreams.

[...]

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^[1] Alejandra Pizarnik

^[2] “Cuenteniks” were door-to-door merchants without a storefront or physical shop.

^[3] United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization.

^[4] It was then that her father entered her language becoming the “ojos azules” that appear dotted throughout her work from then on out.

^[5] To clarify, discussing these aspects can at times quickly turn into dramatizing Pizarnik or making a spectacle of her eccentricity.

^[6] My point here is not to elucidate the image I have of “the twentieth-century artist,” but rather to transition into talking about the images, caused by her performative aspect, that have been reified by her crtics and readership.

^[7] Phtographic and otherwise

^[8] Self-fashioning and self-image are intricately connected; the former being the process and the latter the product of said process whereby one constructs oneself.

^[9] I speculate these photographs circulated during her lifetime, but perhaps the many published images of her are a ‘posthumous affair,’ broadened by the internet.

^[10] Any and all notions of “liminality” “liminal” “liminoid” or “in-between” in the following essay(s) are borrowed from Victor Turner’s notion of “liminal” as “betwixt and between, neither here nor there, or may even be nowhere (in terms of any recognized cultural topography),” (Turner 7) from The Liminal Period In Rites of Passage.

^[11] In January 2011 I attended a retreat headed by Rabbi Friedman who is a well known Chabad-Lubuvitch Hasidic Rabbi, author, and Torah scholar. During the week-long retreat I took classes with him and had a few one-on-one and small group discussions with him, as well, where I was able to ask him questions pertinent to my thesis.

^[12] Baudelaire comes up frequently in Pizarnik’s diaries (pgs. 56, 344, 417, 418).

^[13] “The revolution of 1930 introduced a period of political unrest in Argentina in which nationalist and anti-Semitic organizations played no small part. From 1933 onward, anti-Semitic activity increased, encouraged by German diplomatic institutions and by the local branch of the German Nazi Party, until it became a central problem for Argentinian Jewry. The immigration decree of October 1938 increased discrimination against Jewish immigrants […] From 1933 to 1943 between 20,000 and 30,000 Jews entered Argentina by exploiting various loopholes in the law. Between 6,000 and 10,000 of them had to use illegal means to immigrate and their legal status was regulated only after a general amnesty was declared for illegal immigrants in 1948. When news of the Holocaust reached Argentina in 1943, Jewish organizations managed to convince the government to accept 1,000 Jewish children, but for various reasons this rescue operation was never carried out. […] Neither overt public hostility nor the occasional official prohibition of the use of Yiddish at public meetings arrested the development of the Jewish community.” Excerpted from Argentina; In : Encyclopaedia Judaica 1971, vol. 3. http://www.geschichteinchronologie.ch/am-S/argentinien/EncJud/EncJud_juden-in-argentinien06-1930-1946.html

• Course: Poetry and Prose Poems of Alejandra Pizarnik
• Grade: Pass
• Author: Juliana Nalerio (Author)
• Publication Year: 2011
• Pages: 112
• Catalog Number: V196285
• ISBN (eBook): 9783656224464
• ISBN (Book): 9783656224662
• Language: English
• Tags: translating, reimagining, recovering, pizarnik, prose, works